Tag Archives: video

Curating Exhibition Video for Digital Platforms

First, let me begin this post with a hearty “hello”! This is my first Labs blog post, though I’ve been on board with the Digital and Emerging Media team since July 2015 as Media Technologist. Day-to-day I participate in much of the Labs activity that you’ve read about here: maintaining and improving our website; looking for ways to enhance visitor experience; and expanding the meaningful implementation of technology at Cooper Hewitt. In this post I will focus on the slice of my work that pertains to video content and exhibitions.

Detail: Brochure, Memphis (Condominiums): Portfolio, 1985

The topic of exhibition video is fresh in my mind since we are just off the installation of Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. This is a multi-floor exhibit that contains twenty-one videos hand-picked or commissioned by the exhibition curators. My part in the exhibition workflow is to format, brand, caption and quality-check videos, ushering them through a production flow that results in their display in the galleries and distribution online. Along with the rest of the Labs team, I also advise on the presentation and installation of videos and interactive experiences in exhibitions and on the web, and help steer the integration of Pen functionality with exhibition content. This post gathers some of my video-minded observations collected on the road to installing Beauty.

The Beauty curators and the Labs team came together when content for the show began to arrive—both loans of physical objects and digital file transfers. At this time, my video workflow shifted into high gear, and I began to really see the landscape of digital content planned for the exhibit. Videos in Beauty fall into roughly two categories: those that are the primary highlighted object on display and those that supplement the display of another object. Sam Brenner recently posted about reformatting our web presentation of video content when it stands in as primary collection object and has a medium that is “video, animation or other[wise] screen-based.” This change was a result of thinking through the flag we raised earlier for the curators around linking collection records to tags, i.e. “what visitors get when they collect works with the Pen.” As has been mentioned before on this blog, the relationship of collecting points (NFC tags) to collection objects does not need to be one-to-one; Beauty expanded our exploration of the tags-to-collection records relationship in a few interesting ways.

When visitors collect at the Neri Oxman tag they save a cluster of collections database records, including 12 glass vessels and a video.

In the Beauty exhibition, collecting points are presented uniformly: one tag in each object label. Additionally, tags positioned beside wall text panels allow visitors to save chunks of written exhibition content. The curatorial format of the Triennial exhibition organized around designers (sometimes with multiple works on display), however, encouraged us to think carefully about the tag-collecting relationship. I was impressed to see the curators curating the Pen experience, including notes to me along with each video, like “the works in the show are jewelry pieces; the video will supplement,” “video is primary object; digital prints supplement,” and “video clips sequenced together for display but each video is separately collectible.” They were really thinking about the user flow of the Pen and the post-visit experience, extending their role in organizing and presenting information to all aspects of the museum experience.

Another first in the Beauty exhibition is the video content created specifically for interactive tables. With the curators’ encouragement, the designers featured in the exhibition considered the tables as a unique environment to present bonus content. For example, Olivier van Herpt provided a video of his 3D printer at work on the ceramic vessels on display in the exhibition. It was interesting to see the possibilities that the tables and post-visit outlets opened up—for one thing, the quality standards can be more relaxed for videos shown outside the monitors in the galleries. Also notable is the fact that the Beauty curators selected behind-the-scenes-type videos for tables and post-visit, suggesting that these outlets make room for content that might not typically make it onto gallery walls.

Still from Oliver van Herpt's "3D Printed Ceramic Process"

The video “3D Printed Ceramic Process” by Oliver van Herpt is an example of behind-the-scenes video content that was made for tables and website display only.

The practical fallout on my end was that these supplemental videos added to the already video-heavy exhibition, putting increased pressure on the video workflow. In turn, this revealed a major lack of optimization. The diagram of my video workflow shows, for example, several repeated instances of formatting, captioning and exporting. Multiplied by twenty-one, each of these redundant procedures takes up significant time. Application of branding is probably the biggest time-hog in the workflow—all of it is done manually and locking in the information of maker, credit line and video title with curators and designers is a substantial task. It’s funny, the amount of video content is increasing in exhibitions at Cooper Hewitt and it’s receiving increased attention from curators, but the supplementary videos in the galleries are not treated as first-order exhibition objects, so they don’t go through as rigorous a documentation process as other works in the show. Because of this, video-specific information required for my workflow remained in flux until the very last minute. Even the video content itself continued to shift as designers pushed past my deadlines to request more time to make changes and additions. In truth, the deadlines related to in-gallery video content are much stricter than those for table/post-visit-only content because gallery videos require hardware installation. The environment of the tables and website afford continual change, but deadlines act as benchmarks to keep those interfaces stocked with new content that stays in sync with objects in the physical exhibition.

The workflow that videos follow to get to gallery screens, interactive tables and the collections website.

I maintain a spreadsheet to collect video information and maintain order over my exhibitions video workflow. These are the column headings.

All the steps and data points that need to be checked-off in my exhibition video workflow.

By the exhibition opening, I had all video information confirmed, and all branding and formatting completed. The running spreadsheet I keep as a video to-do list was filled with check-marks and green (good-to-go) highlighting. I had created media records in TMS and connected them to exhibition videos uploaded to YouTube; this allows a script to pull in the embed code so videos appear within the YouTube player on the collections site. I also linked the media records to other database entries so that they would show up on the collections site in relation to other objects and people. For example, since I linked the “Afreaks Process” video record to all of the records for the beaded Afreak objects, the video appears on each object page, like the one for The Haas Brothers and Haas Sisters’ “Evelyn”. Related videos like this one (that are not the primary object) are configured to appear at the bottom of an object page with the language, “We have 1 video that features Sculpture, Evelyn, from the Afreaks series, 2015.” Since the video has its own record in the database, there is also a corresponding “video page” for the same clip that presents the video at the top with related objects in a grid view below. I also connected object records to database entries for people, ensuring that visitors who click on a name find videos among the list of associated objects.

Screenshot of Haas Brothers record webpage

The webpage for the Haas Brothers record includes a video among the related objects.

It is highly gratifying to seed videos into this web of database connections. The content is so rich and so interesting that it really enhances the texture of the collections site and of exhibitions. Cooper Hewitt curators demonstrated their appreciation for the value of video by honoring video works as primary objects on display. They also utilized video in a demonstrative way to enhance the presentation of highlighted works. Beauty opened the doors for curating video works on interactive tables, and grouping videos in with clusters of data linked to collecting points (aka. tags). I’m pleased with the overall highly integrated and considered take on video content in the latest exhibition, and I hope we can push the integration even further as the curators become increasingly invested in adapting their practice to the extended exhibition platforms we have in place like tables, tags and web.

Sharing our videos, forever

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This is one in a series of Labs blogposts exploring the inhouse built technologies and tools that enable everything you see in our galleries.

Our galleries and Pen experience are driven by the idea that everything a visitor can see or do in the museum itself should be accessible later on.

Part of getting the collections site and API (which drives all the interfaces in the galleries designed by Local Projects) ready for reopening has involved the gathering and, in some cases, generation of data to display with our exhibits and on our new interactive tables. In the coming weeks, I’ll be playing blogger catch-up and will write about these new features. Today, I’ll start with videos.

Besides the dozens videos produced in-house by Katie – such as the amazing Design Dictionary series – we have other videos relating to people, objects and exhibitions in the museum. Currently, these are all streamed on our YouTube channel. While this made hosting much easier, it meant that videos were not easily related to the rest of our collection and therefore much harder to find. In the past, there were also many videos that we simply didn’t have the rights to show after their related exhibition had ended, and all the research and work that went into producing the video was lost to anyone who missed it in the gallery. A large part of this effort was ensuring that we have the rights to keep these videos public, and so we are immensely grateful to Matthew Kennedy, who handles all our image rights, for doing that hard work.

A few months ago, we began the process of adding videos and their metadata in to our collections website and API. As a result, when you take a look at our page for Tokujin Yoshioka’s Honey-Pop chair , below the object metadata, you can see its related video in which our curators and conservators discuss its unique qualities. Similarly, when you visit our page for our former director, the late Bill Moggridge, you can see two videos featuring him, which in turn link to their own exhibitions and objects. Or, if you’d prefer, you can just see all of our videos here.

In addition to its inclusion in the website, video data is also now available over our API. When calling an API method for an object, person or exhibition from our collection, paths to the various video sizes, formats and subtitle files are returned. Here’s an example response for one of Bill’s two videos:

{
  "id": "68764297",
  "youtube_url": "www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAHHSS_WgfI",
  "title": "Bill Moggridge on Interaction Design",
  "description": "Bill Moggridge, industrial designer and co-founder of IDEO, talks about the advent of interaction design.",
  "formats": {
    "mp4": {
      "1080": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.collection.cooperhewitt.org/DIGVID0059_1080.mp4",
      "1080_subtitled": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.collection.cooperhewitt.org/DIGVID0059_1080_s.mp4",
      "720": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.collection.cooperhewitt.org/DIGVID0059_720.mp4",
      "720_subtitled": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.collection.cooperhewitt.org/DIGVID0059_720_s.mp4"
    }
  },
  "srt": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.collection.cooperhewitt.org/DIGVID0059.srt"
}

The first step in accomplishing this was to process the videos into all the formats we would need. To facilitate this task, I built VidSmanger, which processes source videos of multiple sizes and formats into consistent, predictable derivative versions. At its core, VidSmanger is a wrapper around ffmpeg, an open-source multimedia encoding program. As its input, VidSmanger takes a folder of source videos and, optionally, a folder of SRT subtitle files. It outputs various sizes (currently 1280×720 and 1920×1080), various formats (currently only mp4, though any ffmpeg-supported codec will work), and will bake-in subtitles for in-gallery display. It gives all of these derivative versions predictable names that we will use when constructing the API response.

Because VidSmanger is a shell script composed mostly of simple command line commands, it is easily augmented. We hope to add animated gif generation for our thumbnail images and automatic S3 uploading into the process soon. Here’s a proof-of-concept gif generated over the command line using these instructions. We could easily add the appropriate commands into VidSmanger so these get made for every video.

For now, VidSmanger is open-source and available on our GitHub page! To use it, first clone the repo and the run:

./bin/init.sh

This will initialize the folder structure and install any dependencies (homebrew and ffmpeg). Then add all your videos to the source-to-encode folder and run:

./bin/encode.sh

Now you’re smanging!

Making of: Design Dictionary Video Series

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We often champion processes of iterative prototyping in our exhibitions and educational workshops about design. Practicing what we preach by actually adopting iterative prototyping workflows in-house is something we’ve been working on internally at Cooper Hewitt for the last few years.

In the 3.5 years that I’ve been here, I’ve observed some inspiring progress on this front. Here’s one story of iterative prototyping and inter-departmental collaboration in-house, this time for our new Design Dictionary web video series.

Design Dictionary is a 14-part video series that aims to demystify everything from tapestry weaving to 3D printing in a quick and highly visual way. With this project, we aimed not only to produce a fun and educationally valuable new video series, but also to shake up our internal workflow.

Content production isn’t the first thing you’d think of when discussing iterative prototyping workflows, but it’s just as useful for media production as it is for hardware, software, graphic design, and other more familiar design processes.

The origin of Design Dictionary traces back to a new monthly meeting series that was kicked off about two years ago. The purpose of the meetings was to get Education, Curatorial, and Digital staff in the same room to talk about the content being developed for our new permanent collection exhibition, Making Design. We wanted everything from the wall labels to the digital interactive experiences to really resonate with our various audiences. Though logistically clunkier and more challenging than allowing content development to happen in a small circle, big-ish monthly meetings held the promise of diverse points of view and the potential for unexpected and interesting ideas.

At one of these meetings, when talking about videos to accompany the exhibition, the curators and educators both expressed a desire to illustrate the various design techniques employed in our collection via video. It was noted that video of most any technique is already available online, but since these videos are of varying quality, accuracy, and copyright allowances, and it might be worth it to produce our own series.

I got the ball rolling by creating a list of techniques that will appear more than once in Making Design.

Then I collected a handful of similar videos online, to help center the conversation about project goals. Even the habitual “lurkers” on Basecamp were willing to chime in when it came to criticizing other orgs’ educational videos: “so boring!” “so dry!” they said. This was interesting, because as a media producer it can be hard to 1) get people to actually participate and submit their thoughts and 2) break it to someone that their idea for a new video is extremely boring.

Once we were critiquing *somebody else’s* educational videos, and not our own darling ideas, people seemed more able to see video content from a viewer’s perspective (impatient, wanting excitement) as opposed to a curator/educator’s perspective (fixated on detail, accuracy, thoroughness, less concerned with the viewer’s interests & attention span).

I kept this note taped to my screen as a reminder of the 4 project goals.

It is amazingly easy to get confused and lost mid-project if you don’t keep your goals close. This is why I clung tightly to the sticky note shown above. When everyone involved can agree on goals up-front, the project itself can shape-shift quite nicely and organically, but the goals stay firm. Stakeholders’ concerns can be evaluated against the goals, not against your org. hierarchy or any other such evil criteria.

Even with all the viewer-centric empathy in the world, it can still be hard to predict what your audience will like and dislike. Would a video about tapestry weaving get any views on YouTube? What about 3D printing?

Screen shot of a tweet that says: Last chance! Tell us which design techniques interest you most in this one-question survey: https://bit.ly/Museum4U

We asked our Twitter followers which techniques interest them most.

We created a quick survey on SurveyMonkey and blasted it out to our followers on Facebook and Twitter to gauge the temperature.

a list of design techniques, each with an orange bar showing percentage of people who voted for that technique.

Surveying our Twitter and Facebook fans with SurveyMonkey, to learn which techniques they’d be interested in learning more about.

We also hosted the same survey on Qualaroo, which pops up on our website. My hunch about what people would say was all wrong. We used these survey results to help choose which techniques would get a video.

By this point, it was mid-winter 2014, and our new brand from Pentagram was starting to get locked in. It was a good opportunity to play with the idea of expressing this new brand via video. What should the pacing and rhythm be like? How should animations feel? What kind of music should we use?

grid of various images, each with a caption, like a mood board or bulletin board.

Public mood-boarding with Pinterest.

Seb & I are fans of “Look Around You” and we liked the idea of a somewhat cheeky approach to the dreaded “educational video.” How about an educational video that (lovingly, artfully) mocks the very format of educational videos? I created a Pinterest board to help with the art direction. We couldn’t go too kitsch with the videos, however, because our new brand is pretty slick and that would have clashed.

Then I made a low-stakes, low-cost prototype, recycling footage from a previous project. I sent this out to the curatorial/education team for feedback using Basecamp.

In retrospect I can now see that this video is awful. But at the time, it seemed pretty good to me. This is why we prototype, people!

With feedback from colleagues via Basecamp (less book, more live action, more prominent type), I made the next prototype:

I got mixed reactions about the new typography. Some found it distracting. And I was still getting a lot of mixed reactions to the book. So here was my third pass:

I was starting to reach out to artists and designers to lend their time to the shoots, and was cycling that fresh footage into the project, and cycling the new video drafts back to the group for feedback. Partially because we were on a deadline and partially because it works well in iterative projects, we didn’t wait for closure on step 1 before moving on to step 2.

a pile of scrap papers, each with different lists saying things like: "copy pattern, cover pattern with contact paper, mount pattern" or "embroidery steps: 1) cut fabric 2) stretch main fabric onto hoop 3) cut thread" et cetera

I got a crash course in 14 different techniques.

Every new shoot presented a new chance to test the look and feel and get reactions from my colleagues. Here was a video where I tried my own hand at graphical “annotations” (dovetail, interlock, slit):

By this point my prototype was refined enough to share with Pentagram, who were actively working on our digital collateral. I asked them to style a typographic solution for the series, which could serve as the basis for other museum videos as well. Whenever you can provide a designer with real content, do it, because it’s so much better than using dummy content. Dummy content is soft and easy, allowing itself to be styled in a way that looks good, but meets no real requirements when put through a real stress test (long words, bulky text, realistic quantities of donor credits, real stakeholders wanting their interests represented prominently).

Here is a revised video that takes Pentagram’s new, crisp typography into account:

This got very good feedback from education and curatorial. And I liked it too. Yay.

All-in-all, it took about 8 rounds of revision to get from the first cruddy prototype to the final polished result.

And here are the final versions.

Cooper Hewitt Labs

Technology + Media + Experience

Tag Archives: video

Curating Exhibition Video for Digital Platforms

Sharing our videos, forever

Making of: Design Dictionary Video Series